The era is over

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
For about eight hours Tuesday, his many fans in the news media imagined John
Kerry was going to be the next president of the United States.

"The word here is a Kerry blowout, and almost everyone here is happy," said
the web logger John Hinderaker (Power Line) just before 2:00 p.m. He was
part of a panel of bloggers recruited as commentators by NBC.

But the news media had been bamboozled by their own fishy exit polls.

"It takes a deliberate act of fraud or bias to get an exit poll wrong," said
former Clinton political guru Dick Morris. "Since the variables of whether
or not a person will actually vote are eliminated in exit polling, it is
like peeking at the answer before taking the test."

"My own suspicion is that some Democrats ...had an election day project of
slamming the results," said political analyst Michael Barone.

The margin of victory was narrow enough for some Democrats to contemplate
fighting on (Kerry, thankfully, was not among them). But Bush became the
first president since his dad 16 years ago to win an absolute majority of
the popular vote.

And though Bush's majority pales compared to the landslides racked up by
Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, Bush did something neither of them could
do. He brought his party along with him. Republicans gained four seats in
the Senate and four in the House, giving the GOP firm control of both the
elected branches of government.

The relatively small size of Bush's victory should not obscure the magnitude
of his triumph. He defeated far more than just John Kerry and the
Democratic Party:

A vast amount of money was poured into anti-Bush "527" committees, made
possible by the badly misfiring McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law.
Three billionaires alone  George Soros, Peter Lewis and Stephen Bing 
spent more than $60 million to defeat the president.

There was unprecedented foreign meddling against Bush. UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan made some snarky speeches. Mohammed el Baradei, head of
the UN's nuclear watchdog agency, collaborated with CBS and the New York
Times to fabricate a story about missing munitions from the al Qaqaa
facility south of Baghdad. Even Osama bin Laden tried to influence the
election.

Left wingers in the CIA fabricated a story that Bush misled the country
when he said Saddam Hussein had attempted to acquire weapons grade uranium
from Africa, and leaked it to friendly reporters.
"One has to hope that, in his second term, the president will take pains to
insure that America's diplomats and intelligence officers support the
government for which they are working," said Clifford May, a former foreign
correspondent for the New York Times.

Most important, the news media emphasized anti-Bush stories (even if
they were false) and buried anti-Kerry stories (even though they were true)
throughout the campaign. The nonpartisan Project for Excellence in
Journalism found in a study released Oct. 27th that 59 percent of the
stories about Bush in the news organs they covered were negative, while only
25 percent of stories about Kerry were negative.

The news media, for instance, considered it highly important that a young
George Bush had missed four drills with the Alabama Air National Guard, but
thought it unworthy of mention that a young John Kerry had met twice with
America's enemies in time of war and coordinated some activities with them;
attended a meeting where the assassination of U.S. senators was discussed,
and (apparently) originally received a less than honorable discharge from
the Navy.

"The media want Kerry to win," Newsweek Editor Evan Thomas said in an
unguarded moment on a Washington D.C. talk show last summer. "They're going
to portray Kerry and Edwards as young and dynamic and optimistic and
all...That's going to be worth maybe 15 points."

This was more media hubris. Thomas reduced his original estimate to a more
realistic five percentage points last month. But  extrapolating from
Thomas  if the media had played it straight, Bush would have beaten Kerry
by an additional six million votes, and won a landslide in the electoral
college.

The entire liberal establishment  not just in America but worldwide 
tried to beat Bush, by means foul as well as fair. They failed. A
political era has ended.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington
and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a
deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan
administration. Comment by clicking here.